The global internet usage and especially social media have become an essential part of everyday life for most of us. Being aware of the huge penetration of social media in both of our societies raises the question to what degree does social media influence our culture, behavior, and perception? People can be influenced on a greater scale supported by media technology. Images and videos outrun the written word with the consumer. German students and Indonesian students teamed up to find out more about the connection between virtual and real conception of cooking and baking content on the internet. We have two sides of the same coin. German students watch Indonesian content and Indonesians the German content. That way we can identify interesting, new and even unexpected revelations about other peoples’ cooking-culture. We are trying to find out where the differences lie and where we behave similarly. Can we learn something from other cultures even in the quick time of the internet?

In an effort to connect two different cultures, we are using cooking and baking videos from YouTube to find out how our uses in media differ in the age of the internet. Besides more obvious differences, like food-content and food-style, we will also work on less obvious differences, such as healthfulness and video-pacing. The central point that we are working around describes how differently we perceive these videos. It turns out that the internet is significantly less cultured than other mediums, such as TV or print. Trends travel faster and are anticipated more effectively. But there are still differences in these cooking and baking videos from different parts of the world, less in the videography and more in the content itself. People will be people, as we will demonstrate.

The participants had to write down first, second and third associations of the visuals. The first impression can differ strongly from the third one, which is why it is important to ask for associations right in the beginning before they can form their final opinion on what they observed. This way we will be able to get a glance at the perception of each participant and we are able to compare the direct thoughts of everyone that completed the survey. We can get clues as to what different groups see in these visuals and what they might have in common based not only on different nationalities but also on age-groups, for example. Following the associations, the participants filled out a polarity-questionnaire concerning the two visuals. We used the keywords that we extracted from the screenshots we captured whilst watching the YouTube videos. The results confirm our thoughts of the opposing internet culture, to prove that we perceive Social Media content in a similar way, even if it is structured or composed differently.

The last part, completing the survey, is a collection of yes-no-questions. They are the same for both visuals, which is important for accuracy in the analysis of the data. We worked out a couple of really important questions and added some with less weight to keep the participant interested. The specific targeted questions were an effective way to, in the end, get the information that we are looking for in our hypothesis. We asked 13 people on the streets of Yogyakarta, eight of which were of Indonesian heritage and five European. The participants were slightly more often male than female and the amount of youth and young adults was equal.

It was quickly clear that the construction of the videos was similar in both Indonesia and Germany. Compository devices and styles were similarly covered from amateur videos up to professional productions. However, the content of the videos did differ. Not only was the food which was being prepared different but also the methods used to do so as well as the people that were involved in the video were different. Spontaneous actions or scripted interactions were the main difference between Indonesian and German cooking videos on YouTube. Our research led to several smaller resolutions. People saw the Indonesian food as more healthy whilst German food and pastry appeared as very unhealthy. Besides this dominant observation, Indonesian food was perceived as interactive with traditional and childish influences. German food was identified as appetizing and the process seemed modern, professional and structured. One unique element that arose through the questionnaire was found by extracting the associations of Germans for the Indonesian visual and the other way round. Germans perceived the Indonesian food as busy, whilst Indonesians saw the German food as girly or romantic. When exposed to the Indonesian keyvisual, which was prepared by the Germans in the group, the main keywords to describe the situation around the food were spontaneous and entertaining for Europeans, familiar and kind of boring for Indonesians. The other keyvisual, which was prepared by the Indonesian participants of the group, found answers such as unhealthy and appetizing from both Europeans and Indonesians.

In our animation, we decided to use a male illustrative person instead of a female. As our research showed, the unhealthy sweets were connected more towards attributes such as girly or romantic, which leads us to assume that gender might play a role in the bigger picture. Women are trying to break free from the normalized picture where they have to look pretty and clean. It is questionable whether this is the right way to achieve a form of freedom that they seek. Whilst the food in the videos is still very different in both cultures, the composition of the medium is strongly similar. Where the food was created and improved over thousands of years, the internet was only established less than half a decade ago. It is the fastest most used and widest-ranging interaction-network in the entire world, which is why the content we see will usually result in a globalized generalization. If you want to reach as many people as possible, you will have to speak to as many people as possible. Younger generations grew up alongside the Internet and learned to use it to their advantage, whereas older generations might still use the mediums they grew up with, such as print media and TV. The difference is, that TV is made for regional coverage, just like papers. It is only through the Internet that TV and paper become accessible for everyone and therefore globally interesting. TV is just like food anchored in traditions and cultures, it will be seen by regions, not by the entire world. There are differences that aren’t as prominent on the internet, so we can only hope that one day we will all be more like each other, to learn the good and forget the bad, through the internet.